Month: January 2017

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Normally, a giant printout of upcoming third-party game-console accessories isn't news. But when the system in question is the Nintendo Switch, which still hasn't received a full reveal, the newsworthiness of things like screen protectors and AC adapters increases.

On Tuesday, a French Twitter user posted over a dozen pages of an internal document from the game-peripheral company Hori, and it contained detailed "working concepts" for products relating to the upcoming Nintendo Switch console. (While the leaker said he was unsure about the documents' accuracy, at least one editor, from Let's Play Videogames, has vouched for the leak's accuracy.) Many of the details line up with what Nintendo already revealed in October, including a "March 2017" release window. Some of the tidbits tease launch possibilities.

Current Apple Director of Developer Tools Chris Lattner will be leaving the company for Tesla later this month. (credit: Chris Lattner)

Ted Kremenek, another longtime Apple developer who has been with the company since 2007, will be taking over Lattner's duties as Swift project lead.

Lattner has worked at Apple since 2005, and he's been involved in a lot of major tools and software initiatives over the years. His extensive resume lists many versions of Xcode going back to at least version 3.1, LLVM and the Clang frontend, OpenCL, LLDB, and Swift. He also did some work on macOS, helped tune software performance for the Apple A6 used in the iPhone 5, and helped with the transition to 64-bit ARM CPUs that began with the iPhone 5S. His resume shows a willingness to create, adopt, and evangelize new software and programming languages, which will no doubt be a major component of his work at Tesla. He has also been a major proponent of Apple's open source work, driving the push to make Swift open source and communicating with the Swift community and steering its efforts.

Enlarge / Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates (pictured here in 2015) announced the change in the photo array guidelines in January 2017. (credit: Washington Post / Getty Images News)

The Department of Justice has instituted new guidelines regarding identification in photo arrays of suspects, making the procedure more scientifically rigorous. Notably, these changes include a “blind” administration—where the person giving the exam doesn’t actually know who the actual suspect is—and recording the identification session.

The new guidelines, which were released last Friday, state:

There are times when such "blind" administration may be impracticable, for example, when all of the officers in an investigating office already know who the suspect is, or when a victim-witness refuses to participate in a photo array unless it is administered by the investigating officer. In such cases, the administrator should adopt "blinded" procedures, so that he or she cannot see the order or arrangement of the photographs viewed by the witness or which photograph( s) the witness is viewing at any particular moment.

These guidelines apply specifically to federal agencies including the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency, and not to local law enforcement.

The cost of an entry-level VR system like this has come down quite a bit.

Back when Oculus first launched the Rift VR headset almost a year ago, buying the headset and a minimum-specced computer that could actually power it would run you at least $1,500. Now, the "entry-level" price for PC-tethered virtual reality is already down to $1,100 as part of a new bundle deal.

As Radeon recently announced, CyberPowerPC's "Gamer Ultra VR" tower is now available in a Best Buy bundle with an Oculus Rift headset for just under $1,100 (or $500 for the PC and $600 for the Rift itself). Even without the bundle deal, the tower itself is selling for only $650, the cheapest price we've seen for a pre-built PC that's officially marked as "Oculus Ready."

Part of that price reduction since early 2016 is the normal march of technology making CPUs and GPUs cheaper as they get older. But a bigger part of the change is Oculus' "asynchronous spacewarp" technology, which the company announced in October as a way to calculate a spatial transformation that can fill in missing frames on lower-end hardware.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Guido De Bortoli )

Your workout schedule may have just gotten a lot more flexible: that is, whether you try to fit in a brisk exercise routine every day before dinner or just go big on the weekends after sitting at your 9-to-5 all week—it may not actually matter to your overall health.

Looking at the health data of about 64,000 adults over 18 years, British researchers found that any exercise—however little or infrequent—was still linked to reduced risks of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer. The findings, which appear this week in JAMA Internal Medicine, beef up the idea that there is no “right” way to dole out exercise in your weekly schedule and that there’s no threshold of activity at which health benefits kick in.

“Some leisure time physical activity is better than none,” the authors, led by exercise and health expert Gary O’Donovan of Loughborough University, concluded. More exercise is better, of course. But for those who hit overall weekly goals for activity, “frequency and duration [of workouts] did not matter,” in terms of achieving those health benefits.

Enlarge / A computer infected by Shamoon System is unable to find its operating system. (credit: Palo Alto Networks)

There's a new variant of the Shamoon disk-wiping malware that was originally unleashed on Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company in 2012, and it has a newly added ability to destroy virtual desktops, researchers said.

The new strain is at least the second Shamoon variant to be discovered since late November, when researchers detected the return of disk-wiping malware after taking a more than four-year hiatus. The variant was almost identical to the original one except for the image that was left behind on sabotaged computers. Whereas the old one showed a burning American flag, the new one displayed the iconic photo of the body of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee boy who drowned as his family tried to cross from Turkey to Greece. Like the original Shamoon, which permanently destroyed data on more than 30,000 work stations belonging to Saudi Aramco, the updates also hit one or more Saudi targets that researchers have yet to name.

According to a blog post published Monday night by researchers from Palo Alto networks, the latest variant has been updated to attack virtual desktops, which have emerged as one of the key protections against Shamoon and other types of disk-wiping malware. The update included usernames and passwords related to the virtual desktop infrastructure products from Huawei, which can protect against a destructive malware through its ability to load snapshots of wiped systems.